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Arthur Clark, the writer, underwater explorer, and space promoter died today at his home in Sri Lanka. The 90 year old renaissance man was perhaps best known as the co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clark is considered to have developed the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, in fact, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits. The author of over 100 books, Clark published his best-selling 3001: The Final Odyssey when he was 79. Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989. He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s. And in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
